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Welcome back on the exciting stage here
at RC three.
Our next talk will be held by Katherine
Tai. She's currently doing her
Ph.D. in Political Science
at MIT and writing about Chinese internet
politics.
And that's also the topic of her talk,
which is called Painting Tech Dystopia.
How the West Tells It Saves Fairy Tales
about Asia and Middle East Aerial.
Have fun.
Hey, everyone, thanks for,
I guess, watching my talk.
I called it creating tech dystopia.
How the West tells itself fairy tales
about Asia and believes they're real.
So we want to talk about fairy tales
today. Unfortunately, not
kind of like ones that make you feel good
about yourself, but the ones that maybe
we shouldn't be telling, because some
people's home a belief that they're not
fairy tales.
So basically, when you
hear about technology in Asia, often
there are increasingly this kind of like,
Oh my god, there's this idea and this
vision of a place
that somehow, somehow lives in the future
compared to places like Europe
or North America.
But the problem is that sometimes when
these stories are being told, some
of them simply aren't true, and that's
what this talk is about.
So I want to talk about the things we
say about Asia and the things a lot of
people in the West do do believe about
Asia, but are basically simply factually
untrue.
I think one important disclaimer
is what this talk will do and what it
won't do. So I won't be doing the
debunking here. I'm going to use two
examples of things that people believe
about Asia that are genuinely
just completely B.S.,
but I'm not going to do the debunking.
I think if there's anything we've learned
in the last two years is
that when someone believe something
that's factually untrue, it's not
really easy to convince them of the truth
by just telling them the facts.
There are a lot of other people who've
done the debunking.
So both my examples will have sourced
slides that you can screenshot because
this is a video and so you can screenshot
the sources and look at them yourself.
What I want to do instead is I want to
use those examples and
to kind of give you a sense of like the
absolutely genuinely somewhat ludicrous
things people believe despite not being
true about technology in Asia.
And I want to talk about why this is a
problem and what this means for
tech discourse and which consequences
it has.
So with that out of the way?
Oh yeah. So I basically because I'm not
doing the debunking, you basically have
to take me at my word.
So you have to believe me when I tell you
this is something that it doesn't exist.
I'm sorry. You have to trust me on that.
So with that out of the way, I wanted to
start with my first example, which hits
very close to home these days and which
is electronic contact tracing in Asia.
So last year, in April 2020,
the New York Times wrote twice
in their leads that Asian countries have
invested heavily in digital contact
tracing, which uses technology to warn
people when they have been exposed to the
coronavirus.
In a different article, they wrote.
The French are cautiously considering
digital tracking, which has proved
effective in Asia at
the time. How hard?
Who works for the economist and writes
about technology for them already called
out these New York Times
lead and basically was saying Asian
countries are relying on manual tracing
just like everyone else.
The boss of the Singapore tracking app
says it here. He also spoke to the
Taiwanese CDC.
Similarly, at the time I was in Germany
and I heard everyone talking about these
contact tracing apps that had been so
successful in Asia.
So this was late March,
early April primarily.
And I was like, This is interesting.
I'm going to look into this, and I wanted
to write an article about what
these tracing technologies are and how
they worked.
The thing is, when I went and looked for
these apps, they just didn't exist in the
way people imagined them.
The way what people imagined was
essentially that people in Asia are being
tracked 24-7 and then somehow magically
get a notification that tells them if
they've been in contact with someone
who who had COVID at the time.
The truth, as ever so often is
much more complicated.
Like I've said, I'm not going to be doing
the debunking here, but you need to take
my word for it that at least until very,
very recently, I wasn't able to really
find anywhere in Asia that had somehow
use this magical electronic contact
tracing at scale.
So two examples for debunking this
are a piece that I wrote in German
Firstpost magazine and a
piece in The New Yorker where the author
describes in a lot of detail how
the electronic contact tracing there
really works. I think one important
takeaway from this is that in Germany, in
the last year or so, people have kind of
just been repeating the statement, and
it's now referred to as a fact.
So this idea, this fairy tale that's
kind of somehow seemingly come out of
nowhere has become a fact that people
widely believe, even though it is not
true. I think another thing that's
important about this is that they are
small parcels of truth.
So for instance, when you go to Taiwan,
which I did last November, so
a year ago during the pandemic, you have
to do it to be quarantine.
And during that two week quarantine
period. The government tracks your
location with your phone, but then
somehow it's kind of like
like in a game where, right, like somehow
these like partial truths turn into
something completely different, like in
the public imagination and this whole
like you get tracked for two weeks so you
don't leave quarantine turns into people
in Asia, are being tracked 24-7.
This would be completely impossible.
So it doesn't mean that there is no
electronic means.
It's just that for one, there was
I wasn't really able to find much
evidence that it's doing much.
And to the stuff that's being imagined
in places like Germany or in
the reputable media like the New York
Times isn't necessarily
actually accurate to what's happening.
And the second example
is the China
China's social credit system, which
is a particular favorite.
This whole narrative of the social credit
system came out and
I would say around 2015.
And so there are some great examples of
what people imagine when they talk about
it.
So this is on the left
here. We have a quote
from Politico, who
are telling a reporting on a
United Nations pledge
about artificial intelligence.
So China on Tuesday signed off on a
United Nations pledge to stop artificial
intelligence from wreaking havoc on
societies, including by banning
the use of AI for social scoring
systems, a practice Beijing itself
has popularized in recent years and
currently uses to score Chinese citizens
based on their perceived trustworthiness.
In addition, we have this wonderful
picture from Wired where they visualize,
right, like everyone with the score of
like the three digit score on top of
their heads.
Another nice example comes from a German
newspaper.
I translated this from 2018,
where the author very vividly describes
this really dystopian picture.
Legions of cameras and drones screen
citizens every step for the behavior they
receive or lose points as part of the
social credit system based on if they,
for example, helped a neighbor or ran
through a red light.
It sounds terrifying, right?
Problem is again, is not true.
So with the social credit system, there's
this idea that somehow citizens in
China are scored on a lick
some scale and get a score
out of, I guess, nine hundred ninety
nine, and that somehow
rates their social trustworthiness.
Again, the problem is this isn't true.
Like if you have friends who live in
China, you should ask them if they
have a three digit scorer, and I am
fairly sure that they will tell you no,
they might be other things that are
called social credit, but these are not
the three digit scoring system.
Again, this is something that simply,
genuinely simply exists in the
Western imagination about China.
Again, it's simply not true.
I think one thing that's happening with
social credit, the whole thing is
extremely complex.
But I think one thing that's really
important about it is that
you kind of have this thing that happens
where you have this imaginary that's very
scary and dystopian.
And somehow, like the state is like
omniscient.
And with technology. But then the reality
looks more like the picture that I have
on the slide on the right where you see,
like a woman who's kind of filling up
paper because the South China Morning
Post went to one of the cities that often
gets referenced with the sole social
credit system thing and found
out that actually, a lot of this is like
people filling out paper forms, and a lot
of people in that city don't even know
that the social like they have a social
credit score, allegedly.
And so that it really impacts their life
much less than this,
the Western imagination tells us.
And again, like with the contact
tracing, here's a source slide that is
much longer than the first one.
Again, please screenshot it and read
these things.
A lot of people who have done much more
work on this than I have have written
about and have debunked it.
You can see of the titles the messy truth
about social credit. It's just very
complicated.
China's Orwellian social credit score
isn't real.
The problem is that these people are
again writing against this
idea this fairy tale of a score
that everyone's getting.
And this idea simply isn't true.
So why do we believe
these things about Asia, right?
Like why is it possible for me to
like, talk to a random person in
the US or in Germany?
And they will assume that they
will think that they know that people
in China are being scored for their
social trustworthiness, even though this
isn't true, right? Like, it's like me
telling you that there's pink cows
in the skies in France because
France is right next door.
I will be recording this in Berlin, so
it's quite close.
Like, we know this isn't true, but
somehow we believe like all this other
stuff about Asia, for some reason,
I think one really important part
of the framing here is that
we need to think about these stories as
basically science fiction.
This is basically science fiction.
What's happening here, right?
Like if we're writing these stories, what
we're getting is science fiction because
people are taking small facts,
small bits of information,
often taking them out of context, such
as, for example, the existence of a
document that describes.
Something in a very abstract way that it
called a social credit system.
And then extrapolating from that, so even
though we might have a document that's
just very vague and it's not
really telling you much.
People take that, apply their imagination
to it. And then somehow we end up with
these fairy tales and often very
dystopian fairy tales
in these worlds.
Asia doesn't just become kind of like a
canvas for science fiction writing, but
it becomes specifically a canvas for
dystopian science fiction writing.
And I think that's a particular problem.
So I think the first important takeaway
from this talk should be
that Asia is not your canvas, right?
Like, it's not just a place to project
like techno fears about technology
on. Instead, it's a real place where real
people live and they're like,
they obviously have real problems.
But when we talk about it, we shouldn't
be talking about Asia accurately.
Also, side note Obviously, Asia is very
large, but often it tends to get
conflated into just kind of one
place.
So now I'm going to get into the meat of
the talk because this was just set up.
This is why I'm told this is where I'm
just telling you all the stuff that
people believe. That's not not true.
So I think one important thing why
you should be listening to me and why we
should be thinking about this and having
a conversation about this, because there
are several reasons why this is bad.
And I'm going to tell you five reasons
why it's bad.
The first reason it's racist in its
techno Orientalist, right?
So in English, German and probably
many other media technology
in Asia exists in this techno Orientalist
frame. It's these imaginary stuff like
a place that so other and so different.
But that's not really a real place like
people in Asia, and these imaginations
aren't really necessarily Maginnis real
people.
It becomes again like this imaginary
place that is like
genuinely just honestly just bad
because it deprives these people off
their humanity in Western imaginations
on a practical level.
It also has very practical consequences.
One thing, for instance, that
people in the West like to talk about is
how great democracy is.
The problem is that when people from
China come to places like Germany or the
U.S. and they read media that
sees things that are obviously false
about their home, but they know to be
false because they've lived in these
places. That also undermines trust in
these institutions, and it makes it much,
much harder to actually convince people
that, well, democracy is great.
I've personally like met people
or known people from China who've come
to, for example, Germany and then read
German media and sometimes see things
like this, right? Like these really
blatant obvious wrong
things about China.
And then their conclusion from that is,
Oh, well, that means,
like Western media are just the same as
Chinese media. There's someone in the
background who has like an agenda or who
knows what they're what they want to say.
And so I can't trust them.
And so I think that's a really big
problem.
If you are someone who believes that,
well, somehow democracy should convince
people through the power of its
institutions and kind of
just the power of its existence.
Second reason why it's bad
is that this means
that if we imagine these really big
problems that aren't
necessarily real the way we imagine
them, it means that limited political
energy is essentially
spent on these imaginary phenomena
instead of the real problems.
So one example for this is
this is one of the reasons I use the
political slide earlier, because
remember that those U.N.
principles on A.I.
had an explicit ban on social
scoring in AI systems.
So it's possible that this
is another example where this is coming
from. But like, I have a strong hunch
that specifically something
that was written into there because
people have heard about this thing in
China that doesn't exist in the way they
imagine it.
The problem is that, yes, there are
things that are called social
credit system, and there are obviously
problems in China with like
technology, right?
But that doesn't. But the problem is that
if you're banning things are putting
energy into kind of having these
principles banned things that just don't
exist. You're not spending that energy on
something else. And for example, spending
that energy and figuring out like, for
example, where there's issues with
surveillance.
So if we assume
that political energies, a zero sum game
and energy that spend on one thing cannot
be spent, another thing this means that
if we're trying to combat fantasies, then
we're not using those that energy
to address real problems, which I
personally think is an issue for
activism.
The third reason why this is bad
if we only imagine Asia
as this fantastical, dystopian,
terrifying place that's so
different, then it's also impossible
to learn from each other.
I think both in the good and the bad,
right? I think an example for how this is
difficult with the good is with pandemic
prevention.
I did a lot of
reporting on Taiwan's
pandemic response personally, and
while I wouldn't necessarily say that
countries should simply copy the
Taiwanese model wholesale because
obviously every country is different.
Why Explique, after being there for six
months, I personally do believe that
there are things to learn.
The problem is if we constantly paint
Asia team as like
this whole place
as a place, it is so different and exotic
and dystopian that we cannot learn from
it.
It is impossible for us to actually go
and take the bits that went well and
there from them. I think conversely,
it also makes it harder to learn
from things that go wrong.
Obviously, Asian countries are real
countries that have social issues,
political issues, economic problems
they have. Most of them have capitalism
in some form or another.
They have companies that are profit
driven and will probably lie to their
customers that will sell terrible and
often insecure technology
to people, including the government.
I mean, so things will go wrong,
and I think especially with
a lot of technology is kind of becoming
like big.
So one example is like
emotion recognition, which is an
increasing second growing industry
in China. But if these even the bad
things that are happening, if we
just again assume that Asia is this
imaginary place that's really somehow not
real, which you will see in a lot of
these imaginary right, it's so dystopian,
it's really just a fantasy.
But but then we say, Well, it's so bad
and so dystopian.
It's so different from us that
it makes it harder to look at places in
Asia as a place that you can learn from.
I think a good counter example for this
is the Article 19
report on emotion recognition by
Baidu Shimada and Shezi Dommett,
which is about China's emotion
recognition market and its implications
for human rights. Because they really go
into what's happening in China with
emotion recognition, and they look at the
mechanisms for why some things are going
wrong. And one of the things one of the
examples that they're using is that
companies are selling these technologies
and overpromising what emotion
recognition can do.
And then both private actors, but also
government actors, essentially buy into
those promises.
This isn't like the perfect tech dystopia
that you might be imagining, but the
Chinese state can suddenly read
people's emotions just by looking at
their faces. But it is probably an
important lesson when it comes to
figuring out how we deal with new
technologies, especially when companies
are trying to sell them to you and have
clear profit incentives for overpromising
what those technologies can do so again.
For me, one of the big problems here,
it's it's it's hard to learn from each
other.
If you if the other places
turned into this imaginary other, that's
not really a real place or imagined as a
real place for other
reasons. Fourth reason why it's bad
is there's kind of this trope sometimes
that essentially boils down to it
might be bad, but it's not China, so it's
OK.
So this kind of, I think, is more
narrowly about tech dystopia
that we imagine about China.
I think a very good example of this is
some of the arguments that Facebook has
been making in the past because over
the past few years, I
have an example here from TechCrunch with
a quote Mark Zuckerberg in 2019,
where he essentially said
that you shouldn't be regulating
American tech companies
because if you clip the wings of
the good guys, then the bad guys from
China are winning, right?
So this idea that there is like this
incredibly bad dystopia and
that maybe Facebook has its issues.
But if you break them up and you
control them and regulate them, then the
evil Chinese are going to come.
And that's just going to be so much worse
when in reality, honestly,
both the U.S. and China have, like Big
Tech companies that probably all suck in
their own ways, and it's unclear
if they necessarily want us like
good or worse, like worse or better than
the other.
Like the grand scheme of things.
And I think importantly, this is
essentially being weaponized, right?
So Facebook, in this case is really
trying to paper over its own problems and
trying to fend off regulation because
they're saying, Well, we're not perfect,
but at least we're not China.
And so this is, I think, really a really
dangerous, dangerous thing as
well. I think the other thing in
addition to that is also that it makes it
easier to downplay problems
that happen with technology, for example,
in the realm of surveillance and because
it's great for companies for them to be
always able to say, well, maybe this
isn't great, but there's still China,
which is so much worse.
And you've heard about it because in the
back of the of people's minds, there's
always this dystopia
that they haven't visited and haven't
really seen, but they somehow have like
this vague image of like how it's
terrible that everyone's being surveilled
and all your data is being vacuumed up.
And so again, this is probably giving
power to the wrong people and
makes it harder to address problems that
are happening.
The fifth reason why it's bad and again,
this is a point that's more about China
than about Asia, which I think is often
counterintuitive is that you might
be doing the Chinese government's
propaganda work for them.
If you're kind of perpetuating some of
these myths. I think especially the
social credit system is a good example
of this. But there's also other things
when essentially the power
of technology that the Chinese
government has access to gets
overexaggerated because.
Often this writing comes from people who
think that they're warning against really
dangerous things that are happening in
China. Often these people are people who
think critically of the Chinese
government.
The problem is that they're making the
Chinese government look much more
powerful than they actually are, right?
And so they're kind of creating this
image of like a really powerful and
threatening actor.
And essentially, they're making the
government look much more powerful than
they are.
And so if one of the aims of the
government is to make people scared, then
by telling these stories that when
they are not real, like you're scaring
people unnecessarily. So that's like,
again, another reason for why these
things should be factual.
So
what now?
Honestly, I don't know.
I think one of
the reasons I wanted to do this talk is
that I think it's important that we have
a conversation about this.
I think it's really important that we
have a conversation about the fact that
somehow people belief, but somehow things
have turned to facts that just are
complete bullshit, like they're
just made up things that read like that
come from a science fiction novel and
they are made up.
But somehow they've turned to things that
people just believe about Asia as fact.
And when you tell them that they're
wrong, they get mad at you and tell you
that you're like a shill for the Chinese
government.
I'm not saying that there aren't bad
things happening, right?
I'm saying that we should not be
believing the things that
are not actually happening because we
need to be talking about the real problem
instead of the imaginary problems.
But as I mentioned earlier, we've kind
of learned in the last two years how hard
it is to just launch, like these really
set in stone narratives that have become
fact in people's minds, even though
they're not. And so I don't have an
answer to that.
So I can't like I don't have an answer
for how we get rid of this and how we
stop doing this.
And I don't have an answer for how
we have a better tech
discourse that includes Asia as a real
place and includes people in Asia as
people who have problems and are just
going about their lives in a regular way,
like people in Europe or the United
States or America more broadly.
I think one thing
that I do have is that
I want to give you
some suggestions for
getting a sense of whether something
you're reading might not be entirely
accurate.
This is
this list is primarily based on
a conversation that I had for a podcast
with Shazia Ahmed. So thanks and
most credits for this.
To her, honestly, it's
the podcast episode was referenced in an
earlier slide.
Since this is a video, I can just tell
you to go back and look at that slide
again. So that's great.
So essentially, it's what
we were talking about and that's in that
podcast episode was how do you
read the news about China?
So how should you read the news if you
yourself are not entirely sure
what's going on?
And how do you get a sense of
whether this is something that's accurate
or whether it's one of these fairy tales
just that's just being told.
And so in this context, in particular,
we were speaking about social credit
system as a specific example,
and her work on it is really great.
So I very much recommend her writing.
So the first thing is that a warning
sign is usually when there are repeat
anecdotes and you hear about
exactly the same thing over and over
and over.
And the example that she used at the
time, I think, was someone being
banned from registering for a particular
university because of social
credit like and it was all very vague.
It was not very clear.
And you, if you looked at all the both
the Chinese and the the foreign
reporting, you could tell that the
anecdote itself was always the same.
It was always exactly the same thing
in small details got changed.
But if this was really a thing that was
happening, then there should be more
people who this is happening to, right?
So if there's a phenomenon happening in
China, which is a massive country with a
lot of people there, these things should
be happening to multiple people.
So if there's kind of always the same
thing that keeps being brought up the
same, always the single same example,
then something something is off,
right? It's possible that like something
genuinely happened to that person
and something maybe went wrong or
something bad happened.
But it's really the same thing over
and over again. It's probably not
something that's happening all over the
country.
Secondly is
her advice at the time was to look
at sources and figure out
whether most of the sources in a
particular text are in English or whether
that person. The article is actually
referencing Chinese language sources
because one thing that has happened with
social credit and I think this is
particularly insidious
is that a lot of the
reporting just referenced other
English reporting that was already wrong.
And so there was kind of like the circle
of credibility where people were able to
kind of repeatedly reference other
people, have written wrong things and use
those as sources.
And then it's like with the Asian contact
tracing thing, right?
Like it was the example that I used
earlier was kind of just used
in this New York Times lead.
And so suddenly you have the New York
Times.
Times verifying somehow
that it is indeed there's indeed this
massive digital contact tracing thing
going on in Asia without really going
into specifics.
So often, local
sources and local language sources are
especially important in China.
One thing again is also that it's often
important to be like, for example,
if you're saying a policy is happening,
then like there is that are going
to be a document like no bureaucracy
produces like as many documents as
like the Chinese state bureaucracy.
And so there will be original language
documents that describe this policy.
And so so those unless it's leaked.
And so there ought to be something that
you can describe.
And thirdly, it's important that these
sources are contextualized, right?
So just because, for instance, you've
read a translation
of a Chinese government document or
a Taiwanese government document or like,
I don't know, a Japanese government
document doesn't necessarily mean you
really understand what's going on.
Like, as a political scientist,
I primarily studied Asia.
So when I read a German law, I'm
also like, Well, this is my mother
tongue, but to really understand what's
going on.
So it's important that these things are
contextualized right and put into that
political context.
Fourthly, and I think this this incredibly
important is that it's really important
for all of these tech ideas
that there is ideally
you want specific research
or reporting on the ground, right?
So you will ideally want probably one
reporting where they've spoken to either
researchers who have done work on the
ground or
to actually have done their own reporting
on the ground. So there are some good
examples of this, for example, also with
social credit, there's been some really
good reporting in Germany as well
on this, where people really went and
looked at the specifics and really what
was happening to people, right?
So I'm not I don't I don't want to just
media bash like these good things exist.
It's just that they are much harder
to remember. So specific
reporting and research on the ground to
really give you an idea of what
specifically is happening and what this
technology really looks like, right?
Like how it's really working and its
implementation.
Another important caveat I think that's
important to bear in mind is that people
don't always understand a system just
because they're subject to it.
So just like if I would
go out onto the streets now and
maybe start asking someone on the streets
in Berlin about like German, like German
monetary policy and inflation,
it is quite unlikely that person will.
I mean, if I
ask someone your university, maybe I'll
catch an econ student.
But generally it's quite unlikely that
that person will understand what's going
on. So it's also important that just
because someone is in country doesn't
necessarily mean the tender stand laws,
regulations institutions, right?
So I think this also goes for like, don't
believe what random people tell you about
like Asia, just because they live there
like that doesn't necessarily qualify
them to know what's happening.
This goes for foreigners, but also
for local people. Obviously, they will
know what the experience is like a big
spirit, like living with certain things.
But governments in
Asia and the entire world are often
really bad at explaining things to their
citizens. So you really can't blame
citizens for not necessarily
understanding what is going on.
I think another important thing again,
this is probably more China than Iraq
point is to
be wary of extrapolating from particular
locations to the entire country.
This sounds like a very simple
and maybe stupidly simple statement, but
China is really big.
Asia is really big.
And so, for example, if you hear that
this digital contact tracing in
Seoul, you shouldn't assume that it's
something that's happening in the entire
continent of Asia.
You also can't necessarily assume that
it's something that's happening in the
entire country of South Korea
because in some places, for
example, public health is like maybe like
a state thing or municipalities and
cities are doing a lot of the work.
So again, it's really important to be
wary of just assuming that
because something is happening in a
particular city, that it's something
that's happening that entire country
again. Also something especially
important in China because the Chinese
government often has kind of these
experiments that are happening on the
local level where they have like policy
experiments and implement a policy in one
particular city first or
implement different versions of it in
different cities.
And so especially in those situations,
just because something happens in one
place doesn't necessarily mean that it's
happening everywhere and also doesn't
mean that just because one experiment is
happening one place, that that's the one
that's going to be implemented in the
entire country, right?
If the experiments go badly, they might
just be ended and then nothing ever gets
adopted on a country level.
And I think last year, one thing that's
very important is that it's important to
distinguish between facts and
speculation.
And so maybe this is one thing that you
might be able to catch on to if there's
things that are very vague.
It might be worth trying to figure out
whether this is describing something
that's actually happening or whether it's
something that might be happening, right?
Because often, obviously
technologies that exist
in the present might not be used for
particular nefarious purposes.
But there is a potential for them to be
used that way, and I think it's very
important to be distinguishing between
the possibilities.
The way something could be abused and
the facts in the present, were it
actually like the way
it maybe is already being abused or is
not being abused?
So yes, thank you.
I'm sorry that was a bit of a rant,
but I really genuinely think it's
important that we think about this
critically, that we have a conversation
about it and especially
when we're talking about authoritarian
countries such as China,
that it's important that we talk
about the bad things that do exist
and don't just somehow focus all of our
attention and political energy on things
that are not that don't exist because
there are real problems, there are
real problems everywhere in the world.
And I think overall it's better to spend
political energy on solving problems
that exist instead of making them up
out of thin air.
So, yeah.
Special thanks to Shazia Ahmed.
Virginia KCON and how hard and a few
others for a really productive
conversations about this topic.
This argument could have been more
coherent, but I hope that maybe it makes
you think a bit and that maybe we can
start having a conversation
about why people believe
some of these favored.
Yeah, hi.
So spoilers,
what you just saw was recording.
So just a quick note, since a few days
have passed, since that recording, one
thing that I wanted to quickly add is
that I talked a lot about how
you can recognize
writing about tech in Asia.
That is probably not that great or
it might be missing out on some of the
facts. So I wanted to also briefly give
some to counter examples
that are kind of on opposite ends of the
methodological spectrum.
One is basically any
of their bailiff's work that specifically
has a report in the camps
erm, China's high tech penal colony that
was published a few weeks ago
there in Belarus. An anthropologist, I'm
just reading the book myself and about
halfway through.
But even with sensitive topics such
as the changing of the camps, you managed
to really get an incredible level of
detail with regards to especially the
experience of people in the camps and how
technology is used to
kind of make that experience even worse.
I mean, the other example is
Margaret Roberts book Censored from 2018,
which is a much more focused
quantitative book that analyzes
the way Chinese censorship works online.
So these are, I think, two examples
of different approaches to how you can
do writing or research on technology,
even in a very difficult context like
China very well.
And maybe reading those can give you a
sense of the level of detail that we
should be able to expect from writing.
Even even in certain
countries like China, even if things,
although things have obviously gotten
harder.
Yeah, sorry. So I just wanted to quickly
add that on before starting the Q&A.
Yes, thank you very much for the entire
talk and also for adding that right now.
So if you have any questions for
Catherine, you can ask them on Twitter at
Macedone using the hashtag c3X
Sign or on hearkened
using the channel or C three
dash sign.
And now we have about 12 more minutes
for some questions and the first one.
The first fuel already came
in. The first one is have you seen the
documentary Coded Bias, where the social
credit system in China is compared to
mass surveillance and air applications
in the western world?
If so, would you say that the content of
the documentary is not factual?
I haven't seen the documentary.
I also hope that maybe we cannot make
this entire Q&A about the social credit
system, because, like I've said, a lot of
people who really are working on it have
been doing a lot of debunking in the last
two years.
And I also think that
a lot of these are a lot of the people
that are also doing research on the
topic.
And I am I think honestly,
if you're interested in getting a sense
of what really what is going on.
Seek out those sources of people who have
been on the ground and who have done
fieldwork in China and who have spoken to
people on the ground and can tell
you in as much specific details as
possible weapons implementations look
like. So I would strongly encourage kind
of seeking out those sources and then
hopefully that can help people get a
sense of what really is going on.
But genuinely, there's been so much
material debate on these things
that I don't think it's necessarily
productive to have a conversation about,
like, is this particular bit?
Sure. Is this particular bit true?
Because there are like
there is there are things that are cults,
which are credit. There's many different
things that have that label.
And I think kind of going into like how
complex and messy the whole thing is
would take a piece like a two hour
lecture, probably from someone who has
done way more research on this than I
have.
Okay, that maybe leads
us to the second question that came in so
far, which was that you presented
us with five
sources debunking the Chinese social
credit system. Sorry, it's about the
system again, and the person
is asking that or stating
that they checked all those sources
and none of them were in the peer
reviewed scientific venue.
Can you speak to the credibility of the
sources or do you maybe
have something in general, maybe in a
peer reviewed journal?
I think they want to have it.
I don't know.
I mean, I think, for starters, I would
suggest having a look at the authors of
those articles are so for example,
comment is I was doing research
in China in 2019 on the implementation
of social credit.
I know as a matter of fact that there's
at least I think I think I know
of two dissertations
that are being written right now and for
which research has happened in
pre-pandemic.
But because of the way dissertations work
and the way research works and the way
academic publishing works, it's going to
take a long time, a bit longer, I think,
for those to be publicly available.
I think secondly, one thing that's also
worth noting is that one
impression that I have is that
people want research about like if
people want research on a thing that
doesn't really exist in the way they
imagine it, then it's quite
difficult, right? I think one other thing
where they might not be that much
research, it's also.
I was looking at social credit for
one paper and considering like doing
some work on it, a lot of
it is quite banal and not.
It was really hard to be able to tell
whether it really had any impact.
And the evidence just didn't seem to be
there. And so I think it's also worth
considering that it was a phenomenon and
really that impactful, except for
a tech discourse.
Then there's also very little reason for
empirically minded scholars doing
research on the ground to be doing it
right, so they might instead be focusing
on other phenomena that really do
impact the lives of Chinese people in
those situations.
Obviously, if people are aware of like,
very good like
empirical research that does look at
things, some of the various things are
called social credit are doing that are
impacting people's lives and meaningful
ways.
I'm always open and happy to be
corrected. I think it's just important to
be making these statements based on
specific information and like
actual research from the ground, because
anyone, anyone should know that
the things that are written down in
government documents and any comfort
zone, or they don't really get to tell
you the whole story and only a very small
part of the story.
OK, thank you very much.
As I see here on my machine,
there are no more questions.
I still have one.
Are you going to post a slide somewhere
after the talk or should
people just screenshot everything?
And if people weren't fast
enough to screenshot while I was talking
a little too fast,
I will probably.
I guess I can screenshot the source
slides and put them up on my Twitter
again, but I didn't have any other plans
for putting up the slides.
I think most of the other stuff was just
to be fun being run the pictures to have
something on the slide when I was
talking.
OK, great thing here, then I can just
recommend everyone to follow Katherine
on Twitter at the Katherine Tai.
Oh, and there's one more question,
which is I'll have to read it live.
I haven't read it before.
Can you speak about the challenges of
doing so urological research in countries
like Mainland China?
I mean, yeah, so
the challenges are definitely there.
And I think especially if you're
I think this is especially the case or
among scholars,
and it has been in the recent past for
scholars who do work in changing
institutions, the wiggers.
It's also the case that a lot of other
topics have become quite sensitive,
especially when it comes to, for
instance, African minorities.
I think a huge caveat to
challenges of fieldwork in China is kind
of the big obvious challenge is
that nobody can really go to China right
now to do fieldwork, and nobody has
really been able to go for two years.
So I think basically most knowledge
that we have or what I'm kind of
speaking on is knowledge
that is outdated by two years simply
because not much has been like people
were like there were a lot of things that
people just weren't able to do in the
recent past.
That being said, it
is true that foreign scholars
were often looked at skeptically.
A lot of things were still possible
when the pandemic hit, and
especially on topics that are not
necessarily considered politically
sensitive. So are instance.
Ethnic minorities are clearly
a politically sensitive topic, so that's
something that's probably quite difficult
to be doing and research on the ground on
scholars who work on
wiggers have in the past openly spoken
about how they stopped doing fieldwork or
stopped doing interviews in country
because they didn't like they thought it
would be a danger to their subjects.
On the other hand, topics that are not
necessarily considered politically
sensitive.
This probably, I would say it's likely
much easier.
And I think for, for instance,
social credit is not something that seems
particularly sensitive.
And it's the last time I was in China.
It's not really.
It's not really something that the government's
trying to keep secret.
It's not really something that the
government just like, Oh, we need to hide
this from the world where it's like this
terrible thing that's happening in China.
So I think, like
it definitely varies based on topics.
I think, however, that all of that is
also another caveat for that is that the
situation in China.
From what I hear, it's gotten
generally more difficult to be able to
speak to people because people mistrust
foreign scholars and journalists.
So there are definitely there are
challenges that is definitely true,
especially with a kind of
a progressive resurgence of you based
research on the ground.
So that's like a challenge for the entire
field. Sure.
I think in that sense,
Margaret Roberts's work and a lot
of the other quantitative work that's
happening on China are good
examples of other things that you can
still be doing.
And I think another
example is that you can work with
government documents, for instance.
And one thing the point interesting about
a lot of the work on Xinjiang, and this
is also the thing that happened during my
last book. So he
that I mentioned earlier, he uses a lot
of interviews.
But in addition, he also repeatedly
references government documents
where a lot of the phenomena with regards
to what's happening in Xinjiang were
actually being documented by the Chinese
government itself.
So yes, it's definitely a challenge, and
I'm not going to say it's easy.
And we also things
have probably gotten more difficult
and I've definitely gotten we have
definitely gotten more difficult, but it
is. And so I think that's why it's
important to recognize that there are
things that you can still, there's things
that you can still do, even if they're
not maybe the preferred options.
And I think in addition to that, like
there's even more other things that
you can, for example, look on social
media, like if there's a phenomenon that
affects a lot of people in China,
people are going to be talking about it
on social media, at the song of the songs
that are not sensitive enough to be
heard. There will be an enormous
amount of chatter, and I think a very
good example of this is
this whole idea of the Typekit is
companion were being
this fall. The Chinese government
actually did try to introduce a contact
tracing method that essentially uses
people's cell location
location to see whether they've kind of
met or encountered someone who
had it when they met them.
But the system was so sensitive that
people kept kind of getting red
health codes and people thought
was so ridiculous that all of Weibo was
full of people making fun of it, and
people even wrote songs and poems about
it. And so that really is
it like so it's through research
on the ground genuinely is difficult and
has gotten difficult.
But there's also so many other ways
of learning things about what's
going on in China, and I think we really
have to start recognizing that it is
possible to find out about things.
For example, what social credit?
I mean, like, one easy
thing you could do is ask a Chinese
person and ask them if they have a social
credit score and if they've recently
gotten docked points for, for example,
like running
a red carpet. And if if they
have a score, if they like it does
anything, if it means anything, if they
like, if it impacts the life in any way,
I think that would be a very good and
very easy way of verifying whether this
really incredibly impactful surveillance
system truly exists.
OK, then I have one last
question, which was that
the person asking the question really
liked the point about making the
government more appear more powerful than
it really is and is
asking to what extent
the government actually tries to spread
this kind of myths, or maybe
even as some kind of propaganda to
see more powerful.
Do you know anything about it?
Is that a thing?
I mean,
from a political science point of view,
we know that a lot of the things the
government is doing are
basically demonstrations of power.
I think a good example of this is that
there was research by a high hyphen, one
that shows that, for instance,
propaganda doesn't necessarily really
change the ideas that people hold, but
it's simply a way the government kind of
makes itself appear more powerful
and essentially so basically is able
to show that people don't believe
what the government says, but they become
more fearful because the government being
able to run these incredibly pervasive
propaganda campaigns is a sign how
powerful they are.
So I think in that sense, we do know that
governments, authoritarian governments in
particular, are interested in looking
more powerful than they probably are
because even like there's
different methods, certain governments
staying power but looking extremely
powerful and scary, it's
almost certainly, almost certainly one of
them. And so even if there's no specific
propaganda campaign, we know that
it's definitely a thing that
authoritarian governments tend to
try to do and tend to benefit from.
OK.
And I think there are a few more
questions, maybe you have one shot, maybe
an anecdote or something about a miss
Smith's. So myths about Europe
or the US that are.
Well, Asia again, is a big place, but
that our toehold in Asia, the question
is phrased Oh,
that's a good question.
Oh, not off the top
of my head. I think one interesting.
Just maybe like an interesting general
anecdote with regards to the different
worlds that we live in.
And sometimes, especially when it comes
to China with a very specific media
ecosystem, it's that while there might be
a lot of people in Europe who
believe that COVID
originated in a Chinese lab, there is
a not insignificant number of people in
China who believe that COVID originated
in American lab and was brought to China
by American soldiers.
So I think that's like
maybe not the right answer to the
question, but it might be
a good example of how sometimes these
ideas about the other place
mirror an extremely obvious way.
Yeah.
OK, thank you very much.
I think that's all the time we have
for now. Again, thank you very much for
this very, very interesting talk.
I hope a lot of people watch now
or will watch the recordings later.